Wednesday, May 17, 2017

May '17 Digital Week III

Blu-rays of the Week

The
Accidental Tourist

(Warner Archive)

One of Anne Tyler’s most
satisfying novels—about an emotionally distant travel writer reeling from his
young son’s death and grieving wife’s leaving him who finds redemption and love—became
director Lawrence Kasdan’s best film in 1988. This melancholy romantic comedy with
few false Hollywood moments is also a showcase for extraordinary performances
by William Hurt (husband), Kathleen Turner (wife) and especially Oscar-winning
Geena Davis as the new woman. The movie’s subdued colors look impressive on
Blu; extras are Kasdan’s intro, deleted scenes, vintage making-of featurette
and Davis’s commentary.

Africa’s
Great Civilizations

(PBS)

For his latest
entertaining history lesson, Henry Louis Gates travels to the great continent
to explore nearly a quarter of a millennium’s worth of civilizations that
thrived, traded and battled with and often defeated their adversaries from
Europe and Asia. Throughout these six hour-long episodes, Gates speaks
engagingly with experts who provide edifying discussion and also goes to the
actual locations—from Zimbabwe and Ethiopia to Zanzibar and Timbuktu—which look
ravishing in their uniqueness and importance on Blu-ray.

Good
Morning

(Criterion)

A humanist filmmaker
blessed with uncommon grace and rigor in equal measure, Yasujiro Ozu was the
rare artist who could elevate the quotidian into the sublime, as in this gentle
but hilarious 1959 comedy about two young boys who refuse to speak until their
parents get them a television set. Ozu’s films contain enough wit and insight,
laughter and tears to be worth any discerning viewer’s time; that Criterion has
included Ozu’s amusing silent comedy, 1932’s
I Was Born, But… (Good Morning’s
forerunner), with Donald Sosin’s 2008
musical score, is a delightful bonus. There’s a first-rate new hi-def transfer;
other extras are a fragment of Ozu’s 1929 silent A Straightforward Boy, interview with David Bordwell and video
essay by David Cairns.

The
Loved One

(Warner Archive)

Tony Richardson’s
adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sly novel might have been racy and daring in 1965,
but half a century has dulled its edge and muted its satiric depiction of
Southern California as a land of shallow slickness compared to the more
cultured Old World. The movie is best seen as a time capsule that features
cameos by stars of the day from Jonathan Winters and John Gielgud to Liberace
and Milton Berle. Haskell Wexler’s exquisite B&W widescreen compositions look
even more luminous in hi-def; the only extra is a featurette.

Seven
Days in May

(Warner Archive)

In John Frankenheimer’s
tense 1964 Cold War thriller about a U.S. president whose disarmament overtures
towards Russia triggers an attempted military coup by a cabal of right-wing
generals, an array of stars makes this a deliciously paranoid drama in the
manner of Frankenheimer’s own The
Manchurian Candidate. Frederic March (president), Burt Lancaster (bad guy),
Kirk Douglas (good guy), and Ava Gardner (love interest) are all in top form;
the hi-def transfer brings the striking B&W visuals to the fore, and
there’s a Frankenheimer commentary.

DVDs of the Week

Between
Us

(IFC)

Writer-director Rafael
Palacio Illingworth’s dreary and pretentious drama of a longtime, just-married couple
whose wedding-day argument turns into a chance for both to cheat comes to life
only when that amazing and underrated actress Olivia Thirlby gets a chance to
shine. Too bad Thirlby is stuck in the contradictory part of an intelligent,
confident woman who ends up screwing a performance artist she just met to get a
measure of revenge against her husband, who ends up not what she does. The banal
ending—which fails to be happy and deep simultaneously—perfectly summarizes the
director’s pretentiousness, at the expense of his actors.

The
Great War

(PBS)

PBS’s excellent American Experience series tackles the
complexities of the First World War in a three-part, six-hour documentary which
illustrates how it was the first modern war, one which brought America global
prestige and power but also increasing political difficulties back home. The
must-see program brings together precisely chosen newsreel footage, images,
speeches, songs, etc.(along with Oliver
Platt’s narration) to give a robust flavor of an era of true devastation and
destruction—and a slight hopefulness that there would be no Second World War in
the future.

Blog Archive

About Me

began writing reviews in 1983 for his college newspaper, The Buffalo State Record. Since then, he's written about movies, music, theater, books and videos/DVDs for The New York Times, The Buffalo News, Buffalo Night-Life Magazine, Metro Weekend, Blue Dog Press, Queens Resident, New York Resident, Stagebill, Playbill, Time Out New York, Brooklyn Bridge magazine, Musicworks magazine, The Brooklyn Paper, The West Side Spirit/Our Town, staticmultimedia.com, amazon.com, film-forward.com, filmfestivaltraveler.com and timessquare.com. He's also written the program notes for Brooklyn Philharmonic concerts and penned the liner notes for the 2004 Special Edition CD of "The Big Chill" soundtrack.